


.we will be safe.

by KUG



Category: Wild Kratts
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Gen, Introspection, Minor Injuries, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2019-06-15 11:52:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15412311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KUG/pseuds/KUG
Summary: When the world ends, there's not much left to do but try to find missing friends and family. It just might take a while.





	1. Chapter 1

Martin had never been able to see so many stars in an urban area like this before. Thousands on tens of thousands of silvery flecks clustered into the milky way and spilled beyond, making him wonder how the light of the city could have ever dimmed their brilliant glow.

But there weren’t city lights now, no orange glow of streetlight, soft yellow from someone’s kitchen bathing a patch of backyard grass, no blue-tinged shine of a TV or laptop screen illuminating the face of the user. There were no buzzing neons and shatteringly bright white gas station lights, no dazzling billboards and gaudy signs. No sleepy yellow headlights and drowsy red taillights cut down the streets.

It was just the stars.

Tilting his head against the hood of the truck, Martin looked towards the haunted shadow of skyscrapers cutting through the stars on the near horizon, as dark and dead as the city that spread beneath them. He looked back up to the river of infinite galaxies and rested his hand on the knife lying unsheathed on his stomach.

Humanity was gone, and with them, their lights. It was just Martin and his brother, sleeping beneath the cool and untouchable galaxy.

He heaved a soft, slow sigh.

“We need to find the others,” he whispered to himself.

Only the stars and the crickets heard him, and of course they didn’t care.

They didn’t care that the world had ended either.


	2. Outside the City Walls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The smell of gunpowder leaked away into the weeds."

Driving with the windows down, eyes closed, music playing from the cracked speakers, and the sun warm on his face, Chris could forget that the stretch of road before him was completely empty and would remain so probably until they reached their destination, wherever it was. The wind fluffed his hair and whispered soft little half-truths in his ear, almost drowned out by the music. In the seat beside him, elbow slung out the window to rest comfortably in the sunshine and get even more tanned, Martin drove.

They didn’t have to talk, they’d been together through thick and thin almost all their lives, and at times like this, when everything was calm and quiet, no silence gnawing furiously on their psyche, they could live in comfortable silence. Talking was saved for the nights when the world turned its back on them and left them feeling cold and afraid by the low flames of their campfire.

Martin suddenly jogged his elbow.

Chris opened his eyes, body scarcely moving except to stretch his fingers out to grasp his knife. He didn’t need his brother to point out what was wrong, it was plain to see.

A truck.

A pickup just like theirs, approaching far down the road. They waited, silent, unblinking and scarcely breathing.

It was moving.

Chris sat up, shifted his knife from one hand to the other, and picked the rifle up off the floor.

 _Click. Crack_. A weapon ready to kill, maim, injure. Necessary for survival.

The gunpowder smell seemed to grow stronger in the cabin, ignoring the wind that tried to push it out, overpowering the soft twang of the guitar from the CD player.

The two trucks approached one another, each on one side of the highway, building pressure between them. The brothers tensed, muscles aching with readiness to fight or flee.

They drew level.

Across the weed-covered median, gazes locked. Rifle pointed at shotgun.

For a single moment, everything was still as glass, the wind holding its breath, the singer halting his croon mid-note.

In a single heartbeat, understanding passed between them. Two brothers. A man and a woman, a tiny child cradled between them. Two sets of people, meeting others for perhaps the first time in weeks, but each one still isolated.

They were just trying to get somewhere, who knew where. For that frozen moment, they were stripped down to bare humans, not raiders, survivors, scavengers, just people. They saw each other across the froth of Queen Anne’s Lace in the highway and acknowledged each other.

Then the glass-still moment melted away and the wind tossed the brothers’ hair playfully again, and the country singer crooned his last note of the song.

 _Click_. Violence put away for now. Chris let go of the knife and leaned his head against the back of the seat, tilting his face towards the sun to let it kiss the worry lines away.

The sound of the other engine faded away into the distance and they were alone again. The smell of gunpowder leaked away into the weeds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title is the name of the song I was listening to while writing this. Playlist is here: https://open.spotify.com/user/comfylumberjack/playlist/1Oo2K9fCrY0VcpVSu7dUmU?si=Me0PVNjxQCu0XcejZB93_w


	3. Night Trouble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "He would never pass that place again; as the sun touched it, it was gone."

3 a.m. is a strange hour. Everything becomes a liminal space. When the world around is asleep but you are awake, everything else is calm, soft with silence. Not even the weather feels the same. When the sun comes up, the places you were vanish, because at night it’s a different world. Sometimes, it feels like you’re the only person alive left on earth.

For Martin, it was very nearly true. Chris was curled up asleep in the cab of the truck, but from where he sat Martin couldn’t hear his breathing.

Instinct still made him pull over when stopping, so coarse grass touched his feet where they dangled over the tailgate. The highway beside the truck stretched like an ancient, cracked river toward the horizon.

He had slipped out of the cab so he could sit and cry by himself in the weeds, but 3 a.m. had different ideas. Martin didn’t know what time it actually was, but the calm that had settled over him when his shoes touched the gravel told him that it was 3.

3 a.m. fills you with peace.

Despite the day, dust and scrapes and stony silence, Martin no longer felt like crying.

Stars swirled overhead, and the moon was low. A single cricket crooned sleepily from the other side of the highway, and nothing mattered at all.

Well, it did matter. Just not right now.

Martin reached into his jacket pocket and fished out some earbuds and his old Creature Pod. At another time of day, he would swallow past a lump in his throat and maybe shove it away again. At 3 a.m., he stroked his thumb across the cracked face and didn’t choke back tears. He rode a wave of muted melancholy, and plugged in the earbuds.

The Creature Pod had some battery left right now, and he swiped past photos and videos of other times, weeks, months ago, and selected a song.

Something soft, twangy and thick like a summer night, began to play, and he lay back with his eyes half shut.

At some point, it was no longer 3 a.m., but the soft, lonely grief that had been there left Martin still feeling calm. When it was 5 a.m. and the horizon began to lighten, he shut off the Creature Pod and slipped back into the truck. Chris half woke as the door clicked shut, and he rolled over to bury his face against Martin’s side.

5 a.m. is the blue time, before the sun is quite awake, and if one is awake at that time, all ills are washed away.

Martin put his arm around his brother, and the stone wall between them from yesterday melted into the cool blue air. He cranked the truck and pulled onto the highway. Chris’s eyes drooped and he drifted into sleep again, sliding down until his head was pillowed against his brother’s thigh.

Martin drove into the sunrise and left the 3 a.m. melancholy in the gravel by the highway. He would never pass that place again; as the sun touched it, it was gone.


	4. Habitual Ways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "How unlucky, to be minding your business in the empty highway, when the first car to come by in ages runs you over."

There was a dead bird in the road.

Chris had found some bubblegum in the glovebox of an old minivan recently, and he blew a bubble contemplatively as Martin gently swerved to avoid the tangle of dark feathers.

“A crow,” one of them mused aloud.

“Smart bird,” Martin remarked, “I wonder how it ended up like that?”

“I’ve never seen a run-over crow,” Chris agreed, and scratched gum off of his upper lip.

They were the only people they’d seen in days, so Chris’s remark made them fall silent again, thinking uncomfortably about the fact that there was a crow that’d been hit by a car less than a mile behind them.

Propping his feet up on the dashboard, Chris looked out the window at the cloud-sprinkled sky, and blew another bubble as he silently counted the ammunition in the cabin. There was more in the bed of the truck, but if things got hot and heavy, they might not have the chance to get to it. He crossed his arms so that his elbow rested against the hilt of his machete.

Martin, used to letting Chris think about these things, was feeling sorry for the crow.

How unlucky, to be minding your business in the empty highway, when the first car to come by in ages runs you over.

Martin looked out the window for a moment, idly scanning for a crow family.

Less than two miles further down the road, the truck slowed to a stop, not bothering to pull over; there was, of course, no traffic to worry about. With his rifle cradled loosely in the crook of his elbow, one foot cocked like a drowsy cowboy’s horse at a hitching post, Chris blew another bubble. Martin squatted by the dead crow, feeling a little sad, as he always did, about the tire marks on the poor thing.

“Well,” he said aloud, “it’s pretty old.”

“Him? Or his carcass?” Chris asked.

“The roadkill,” Martin said, getting back to his feet. “Makes you wonder,” he mused, “how could someone _not miss_ two times in a row? They have the whole interstate to themselves.”

“Let’s hope they were going back east, not west like us.”

Martin made a face. “Old habits die hard, I’m still driving on the right side of the road.”

Chris grunted an acknowledgement. For some reason, the moment made him feel like he should be old and grizzled and flicking ash from a cigarette. He felt like a detective in an old film, or a suntanned cowboy. Now Martin felt like a big brother, thinking about who was further up the road.

They kept driving, relieved that at least the crow had been dead for a while.

The third one had flies buzzing around it, and Martin shared a puzzled but grim look with his brother.

Blowing a bubble, Chris opened the glovebox to re-recount the ammunition, and Martin felt a little pang of sadness for the naïve young crow that’d been run over just an hour ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First update in 8 months (sorry), featuring more dialogue than you might ever see in the rest of this story, however long it ends up being
> 
> Something interesting I've noticed about these chapters is that all except for the first one are just above 500 words, this one is just at 503. And on that note, there may be a few more new chapters coming out soon. I took a family roadtrip recently and inspiration poured in for this story


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